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Yesterday it was Google that held a cloud event…today it’s Amazon Web Services’ turn to gain back some of the attention.… Perhaps most important…is the news that AWS WorkSpaces, their Desktop as a Service offering, is now [available]. … WorkSpaces covers Mac and PC use cases, as well as the plethora of mobile devices. … It is undeniably a service that enterprises are demanding. … Pricing is competitive.… In other news, AWS was crowing about its new US Department of Defense approval…in addition to the FedRAMP certification that they’d earned previously.… And then, as expected, came the pricing announcements. … AWS lowered prices across a huge variety of its services, touting its passion for taking cost out of its services wherever possible.

There are some limitations to Amazon WorkSpaces that will make it likely most appealing to small or medium businesses, but coming from a giant like Amazon the service will make waves. [It] lets end users run virtual versions of Windows 7, Office, and other apps on a variety of devices including PCs, Macs, iPads, Kindle Fires, and some Android tablets.… The service is hosted by Amazon so businesses don’t have to manage it themselves. … While Amazon isn’t traditionally the name that businesses turn to…it is increasingly on the radar of IT staff due to the dominance of Amazon Web Services in the cloud market.

Amazon Web Services cut prices for the 42nd time…in the 8 years of Amazon’s cloud existence…and ranged from an average of 51 percent cuts on S3 storage to 38 percent cuts on EC2 M3 compute instances.… As [Amazon] SVP Andy Jassy [said], Amazon has cut cloud pricing 42 times…“largely without any competitive pressure.” Now that there is competitive pressure, I’m betting the speed of those changes will accelerate.

Jassy downplayed any idea that the price cuts were competitive in nature, however.… “Lowering prices is not new for us. It is something we do on a regular basis. Whenever we can take costs out of our own cost structure, we give them back to our customers in the form of lower prices. We should expect us to continue to do this periodically,” Jassy said.… While Jassy downplayed any competitive price pressures from…an increasing number of other cloud providers, he did take the opportunity to make the case of using public clouds over [a] private…in-house cloud service…which would be far more expensive, both in terms of hardware costs and maintenance costs, Jassy argued.

That’s nice. But what if you don’t want to share infrastructure with other AWS customers? Amazon’s Jeff Barr suggests an alternative:

The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) gives you the power to create a logically isolated section. … Today we are making the VPC model even more flexible! You now have the ability to create a VPC peering connection between VPCs in the same AWS Region.… Within a single organization, you can set up peering relationships between VPCs that are run by different departments. … Suppose your organization is…a party to a joint venture. You can use VPC peering to share common resources between members…all within AWS and with full control of the networking topology.

[It] takes some of the hassle out of cross-team collaboration in enterprises where each department has its own public cloud deployment. To enable this and similar use cases, Amazon has made it possible to peer VPCs belonging to different accounts.

For the first terabyte of data, Amazon’s S3 will now charge $0.03 per gigabyte on standard storage and $0.024 for reduced redundancy storage. … Amazon also cut prices for its EC2 cloud computing instances by up to 40 percent.… For Amazon, these are massive price drops. … Across the board, Amazon says, these cuts amount to savings between 36 percent to 65 percent. … Amazon’s RDS database service, too, is going to see 40 percent price cuts across most instances.

[AWS] has received a provisional certification…under the [DoD’s] Cloud Security Model, showing that the company has met…requirements for securing cloud information against attack.… While a number of government users, including the U.S. Navy, already use AWS, the certification means that it’s now easier for them to move more secure workloads into Amazon’s cloud.

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